gregladen | March 15, 2017Mark Steyn is well known to readers of this blog as the intentionally obnoxious Canadian version of Rush Limbaugh who is being sued by our friend and colleague Michael Mann, author of the recent "The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy," for defamation. Steyn is also the author of a terrible book attacking all the climate scientists. Steyn has gone after a lot of pro-science people, including me, and I heard a rumor that he likes to crush kittens. OK, maybe he doesn't crush kittens, but he is explicitly and…
gregladen | March 13, 2017The Key for the above graphic:
Donald Trump's FEMA is not ready for this storm. The entire federal government is understaffed, and there are funding problems, and this applies to FEMA as well.
So, if you are anywhere in the area to be affected by this storm (the weather channel calls it Stella, I call it Trump's Storm One because it is the first big storm on his watch) you need to know that the usual help is not necessarily going to be available.
Maybe we should call it the Ides of March Storm.
A very large area will probably get a very large amount of snow. Keep up with your local NWS…
gregladen | March 13, 2017I had a bunch of quarters in my pocket. About six dollars worth, along with a couple of one dollar coins.
I pulled all the change out of my pocket and placed it on a desktop. I walked away.
A few minutes later, I went to grab the coins so I could bring them to my office and toss them in the coin jar.
One of the coins, quarter or dollar I can not say, was standing on its edge.
My hand was faster than my brain, so I grabbed all the quarters up, thus knocking down the standing coin. I was therefore unable to test the hypothesis that if you drop some coins somewhere and one stands on edge,…
gregladen | March 10, 2017If most of the electricity used to charge your electric car is made by burning coal, is it still worth it, in terms of CO2 release, to buy an electric car?
Yes. And you will also save money on fuel.
Don't believe me? Want me to show you? What, are you from Missouri or something? Fine. I'll show you.
A few years ago, when there were no affordable electric cars that were real cars, we decided to look into buying the next best thing, a hybrid. We wanted to get the Toyota Prius because it looked like a good car, had long proven technology, and all the people we knew who had one were happy…
gregladen | March 9, 2017From the early days of Trump:
Trump: The response to my candidacy out here [in Los Angeles] has been incredible! Off the charts! The polls are unbelievable! Everybody loves me here -- loves me! My hotel phone is ringing off the hoo from major actresses! Major!
Question shouted from the audience: Any of them voters?
Trump: Who cares? They're huge! Not Pamela Lee, but that ballpark. A lot of people have been asking what this election is really about. Well, it's not about the economy, stupid! And it's not character, stupid! And it's not authenticity, Stupid! It's not even about the issues,…
gregladen | March 9, 2017Just got my copy of Birds of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East: A Photographic Guide by Frédéric Jiguet and Aurélien Audevard.
This is the first and only field-ready photographic bird guide that covers every species in Europe. There are 2,200 photos covering 860 species. The West Asian and North African coverage is of all of the species there that have occurred in Europe, so think of this primarily as a European guide.
The entry for the Mute Swan.
I hasten to add and emphasize. These are not your grandaddy's photographs. Many photographic guides have pretty nice looking…
gregladen | March 9, 2017Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the once funny but now highly repetitive cartoon about a nerd who has a job in an office.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt is high up in the top ten list of world class climate scientists. He is Director of the currently under siege GISS Unit of NASA, where much of the climate science done by that agency is carried out. If you read my blog, you've read his work, because you also read RealClimate, where GS writes about climate science in a manner designed to be understandable to the intelligent, honestly interested, thoughtful individual.
Adams has a history of going…
gregladen | March 9, 2017In Health Care Insurance Reform We See The History of the Republican Party
Very few American policy initiatives have been as popular as Obamacare. The fact that several years of Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act did not result in any alternative policies or specific revisions to the law suggest that Republicans were aware of that. Touting opposition and threatening to repeal worked with their base, but actually doing something would lead to widespread outrage and loss of votes, possibly loss of actual elections.
The worst nightmare of Republican members of the House and…
gregladen | March 8, 2017There is some interesting new research out on the Asian Fruit Fly, Drosophila suzukii.
The short version: This sort of fruit fly ruins fruit crops because it prefers to, and is able to, lay its eggs on harder, firmer, unrotten, and, essentially, ripe fruit, thus ruining it. Regular fruit flies focus on rotten fruit such as groundfall.
The Asian fruit fly manages this because of slightly different fruit detection mechanisms, though some of the details of this are not yet known. In the future, it is hoped that the exact chemical used by this fly to find its target ripe fruit can be…
gregladen | March 8, 2017It is now verified that the earliest 2017 tornados -- first tornados of the season -- struck several communities in east-central Minnesota (a few miles north and south of me). So what you say? Especially because it was a mere F1 and didn't hurt anyone!
This is an important event because the earliest recorded tornado of the year in Minnesota was previously March 18th, and that was in 1968. This tornado, striking on March 6th (confirmed yesterday by the NWS) is way earlier than that!
One tornado, near Zimmerman went for nine miles.
A second tornado appears to have passed through the…
gregladen | March 8, 2017How doe a mammal know what a smell is, and more importantly, how does a mammal learn new smells?
Recent research suggests that different kinds of neurons reorganize in novel ways in response to olfactory signals to produce an olfactory memory.
Below is a video made by the research team that explains this. If that video does not render correctly for you, click here to see it on the original page.
From the press release:
The human brain has the ability to recognise and process a very wide range of sensory stimuli, from which it builds a mental representation. But do these representations…
gregladen | March 7, 2017The Crisis We Await
The exact way the Trump presidency ends is not clear. Anything could happen.
Trump had zero idea of what he was getting into with this president thing, and the stresses must be amazing. Clearly, he is being driven over the edge by relatively minor day to day events. Nothing has yet actually happened in this administration. If you ignore self inflicted wounds and self generated drama, and all the protesting against Trump, the world has been pretty quiet. It is as though all the bad guys, all the individuals who do the things that become major international issues or…
gregladen | March 7, 2017Book note:
There are two books you may want to check out because, for the moment (Tuesday, March 7th is the moment), they are deeply discounted at Amazon:
Kindle version for two bucks: The End of Nature
Kindle version for three bucks: The First Americans
I also want to note that Shawn Otto's book, "The War on Science," is now available as an audio book: The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It.
gregladen | March 6, 2017When I was a little, there was this older kid that lived down the street, and he was shunned by all the other kids.
He was shunned because he went to a special school for smart kids. Most everyone else went to either the local Catholic school (as did I) or the public school several blocks away. The school for smart kids was in the public school. A disproportionate number of kids who went to the regular public school were in one of two groups. They were either Catholics from my neighborhood who had been thrown out of Catholic school for being ruffians, or they were local protestants. I would…
gregladen | February 28, 2017Karen Stollznow has edited this book: Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You'd Least Expect, and you will find my chapter on page 112.
This is a great idea for a book. Suppose Susan Blackmore told you she had an out of body experience? Or that Don Prothero had an alien abduction story for you? Or that I claimed I had once hunted down and captured a ghost? Would you believe it??? Indeed.
You would probably be skeptical if any of the 30+ established skeptics who authored chapters in this book told you that they had a paranormal, psychic, or otherwise impossible experience…
gregladen | February 24, 2017Last night, I went to an event, apparently organized by an indivisible group, in Plymouth Mass.
Plymouth is in Minnesota's 3rd Congressional District, and is represented by Congressman Erik Paulsen. Paulsen took over, years ago, from a "reasonable Republican" that even Democrats in CD03 remember fondly. But Paulsen has quietly and without fanfare served as a Tea Party Republican since being elected. During the time that he and Michele Bachmann served in the same Congress, in physically adjoining districts, Paulsen and Bachmann voted the same way on almost every bill, and the few…
gregladen | February 23, 2017Which one are you for? I'll take either. At first I didn't want Ellison to leave MN05, but if he does, and he should if he is DNC chair, we have some excellent replacements lined up, and since MN05 is the most left leaning congressional district in the country, we don't have to worry about it going blue.
BernieDems hate Perez because he supported Clinton, and their vitriol is greater than the hatred of Ellison, who supported Sanders in the primary and then Clinton in the general. But, if we react to BernieDem whinging and temper tantrums, we might as well get out of the game now. These…
gregladen | February 23, 2017Via Media Matters of America. Very interesting segment.
Santer talks about what is is like to be a rogue scientist in a Donald Trump administration.
The words referred to here the twelve words, were part of the 1995 Second Assessment report of the IPCC. That report is regularly updated, and forms the scientific and policy basis for our thinking about climate change at the national and international level. I highly recommend that you have handy at all times what I like to think of as the human-readable version of the most current IPCC report: Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding…
gregladen | February 23, 2017As more and more exoplanets (at first) and earth-like exoplanets (eventually) have been discovered, the way thy are described to us has become increasingly sophisticated. Below are embeds of diverse video descriptions that have been very quickly developed and distributed given the freshness of this latest scientific discovery. Note that the practice of very clearly stating that a particular depiction of something that no human has ever seen, or will ever see, as being an artist's reconstruction has largely fallen by the wayside. Exoplanets are no longer physical features of the universe…